As humans evolve, what can we expect to happen to our consciousness?

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Evolution happens on multiple levels. There’s the physical ‘hardware’ underlying our biological bodies that undergoes evolution, slowly differentiating humans in their ecological niche. We can expect our brains to keep evolving over the course of the hundreds of thousands of years our species is expected to exist.

One intriguing aspect to evolution is how avian brains are, pound for pound, more powerful than mammalian brains. This means they use fewer physical resources to achieve the same cognitive capabilities. Our brains certainly could do with a hardware bump, and it’s not unreasonable to see this happening if we don’t fully gain control over biology and so usurp the process.

Apart from physical evolution, our minds and consciousnesses themselves evolve so they can eventually become better at doing the things they do. Evolution over the course of a single lifetime is slow, but if you look closely enough at enough people, you can draw a slope from the most primitive, barely above lizard consciousness, people driven purely by their bodies and instincts, to people with enough self-direction and drive to make your head spin, to people so wise they seem completely untouchable by virtually anything.

This evolution happens through experiences that we have. We learn things, and that provides us with immediately applicable lessons. For example, you might spend months learning how to shoot an arrow out of a bow. This skill becomes a part of who you are, at least for the rest of your life.

What affects how quickly we learn stuff has many factors, but by far the biggest one is how responsive you are. How quick you are to notice things and respond by changing your approach. Becoming more responsive is how consciousness grows. It appreciates slowly throughout your life.

The lessons you learn also have an effect. When you accumulate wisdom, which is transcendent understanding, the ‘meat’ of the transcendence makes an imprint on your being. Have you ever had an experience of instant recognition of something that is at the same time useful and surprising, like you shouldn’t have been able to pick up on it that quickly, that you should have needed to process it before coming to the understanding? This is that imprint, it’s a pattern in your brain that allows you to see stuff that others usually can’t. These imprints slowly fade, but they make an even fainter impact on your deeper soul. These all collect together to individuate us over time.

We are each evolutionary islands. Islands have peculiar aspects that make them great ‘laboratories’ to study evolution in. It’s no accident that Darwin came up with his theories while on the Galapagos. They’re big enough to provide a complete ecosystem, but not so big that they’re constantly dealing with outside threats. There’s a buffer, and that buffer provides for protection, so you see species slowly get more and more specialized to that ecosystem.

Our minds and brains have a safe cocoon of ideas and abilities and contexts that allow for each of us to find our own life expression. These things interact largely with each other and provide the main meaning behind the lives we lead. As we evolve, that web of internal self-expression slowly clarifies and gets more useful and relevant to others.